How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter? New group forms to encourage recovery of food-service packaging
Posted on July 20, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPlastics News – New group forms to encourage recovery of food-service packaging.
It is good to see manufacturers stepping up to address a problem that has become huge. The manufacturers themselves had had a large contribution to the problem. Making disposable plastic with no regard to recovery is irresponsible. The lack of education provided to the consumers about how to recycle this waste is also another problem the manufacturing industry has been negligent on. Simply putting ‘please recycle this container’ is vastly insufficient to what is needed to get consumers to change their habits that the industry has taught them over the last 30 years, which has been to throw it all in the trash. Lastly consumers themselves need to be more proactive and environmentally conscious and not think it is OK to throw material to trash or to litter.
This all makes for a very large problem of changing our path on the use of plastics to a new path on how to responsibly use plastics. So alliances like the above are a necessary part of this. Just can they, by themselves, start the change and impact others to start to change as well.
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